17 Years in Tech — Why AI Has Me Starting Over

I’ve been in tech since 2004.

I started in the era of standalone servers. I’ve seen every major shift — virtualization, cloud, mobile-first. I was always eager, always enthusiastic about learning new stuff and working on it.

But last 2 years have been very very different.

The shift with AI is real. I’m sure you’ve read that AI is going to come for your jobs. Entry-level coders, gone. Middle management, gone. I’m not talking about jobs specifically, but AI is definitely going to change how things work around us.

We maybe have a year or two before businesses start adopting AI technologies in their workflows and reshuffling how things are done. Reshuffling employee counts. Reshuffling everything.

The real question is — are we ready for it?

I’ve been trying to keep up with all the changes and I’m feeling overwhelmed. You learn one model that does something and next week there is another model that does that better. It’s not going to stop. It’s just going to compound and increase the speed of how things are happening.

And this ambiguity — about how things are going to be, what it means for my job, what it means for my personal life — it’s giving me a lot of anxiety. It’s really stressful to be honest.

I’m sure a lot of you in tech are feeling the same. Seeing the AI change the businesses, change the workflows, change the way things happen very rapidly.

So last few days I’ve been thinking — I should go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. Figure out how AI needs to be in my life. How I want to adapt to it.

It’s evident that we cannot live without AI now. It’s going to be part of our lives going forward. Part of all businesses. And I want to be ready for it when the massive shift happens in one or two years.

I’m going to figure out how AI systems will help me grow personally and professionally. And I’m going to do it my way — privately. I don’t like the idea of sharing my personal data with companies where they’ll have access to my data and train on it. So I’m going to figure out ways to do it without the models learning from my data.

Then build systems that will help me get my life on a track that I don’t have a clear picture of right now. But that’s the part of the journey.

Whatever thinking I do, whatever tools I build, whatever frameworks I figure out — I’m going to share it publicly. Videos, blogs, on X. So that most of you guys who are going through the same can probably resonate with me and figure out what you are going to do.

This is just a start. I’m going to take a break for a few days to rethink, go back to the drawing board, and come back with what I’ve found.

Maybe if this works, everybody watching will get to learn something or work with me. Or maybe it will just end up as a failed project like many of the other failed projects I’ve had in my life.